The open source Asterisk IP-PBX is one of the most disruptive technologies in the market. But plain vanilla Asterisk can be
challenging in that it isn't exactly a point-and-click install with a
simplified GUI administration.

That's where a whole cottage industry of GUI add-ons for Asterisk sprung
up, with one of the leading implementations being Asterisk@Home, renamed and
rebuilt earlier this year, as Trixbox.

Trixbox today announced version 2.0, which extends its ease of use
and functionality beyond its Asterisk base to include integration with SugarCRM.

Trixbox, which started out as a grassroots, community-led open source effort,
was acquired by VoIP vendor Fonality earlier this year.

Fonality had already
been in the market selling an Asterisk-based IP-PBX solution called PBXtra since 2004.

Fonality CEO Chris Lyman explained to internetnews.com that the
Trixbox GUI is all about point-and-click open source.

"In fact, Trixbox 2.0 let's you roll a full Asterisk deployment, with
embedded MySQL (and SugarCRM if you need it) in under an hour, without using
the command line," Lyman said.

Though Trixbox integration with SugarCRM is a new feature, Lyman noted that
Fonality had rolled out SugarCRM internally to automate its own sales
processes.

"As we grew, our internal engineering team needed to build bridges between
PBXtra (our commercial Asterisk product) and Sugar," Lyman recounted.
"Coincidentally, the Trixbox community was doing the same thing on the other
side of the country."

Lyman then met up with John Roberts, the CEO of SugarCRM, and they formalized
plans to build bigger and better bridges between both the free
Trixbox/SugarCRM products and the commercial PBXtra/SugarCRM products.

Trixbox 2.0 also includes a new GUI package manager system that provides for
a more customized installation of packages.

Though Trixbox 2.0 adds a lot of point-and-click ease of use to a
traditional Asterisk deployment, it is potentially missing a critical
component.

That component is Zimbra, the popular AJAX-powered collaboration
suite, which was already integrated with Asterisk.

Lyman noted that though Trixbox doesn't have Zimbra integration yet, they
have been watching Zimbra, and if the community expresses an interest, it will
be included in an upcoming version of Trixbox.

"I am considering a Zimbra rollout internally at Fonality, and if we do that
it might hasten the integration," Lyman said.

Though Trixbox may have features that open source Asterisk does not, Lyman
doesn't see himself competing directly against Asterisk. Other Asterisk-based implementation, however, is another story.

"I am sure it [Trixbox 2] will be competitive for some of the Asterisk-GUI
companies out there like Switchvox or IntuitiveVoice, as it essentially
offers their same service for free," Lyman explained.

"But, I don't think
that it is competitive to Digium directly."

Digium is the lead sponsor of Asterisk, and is led by the founder of the
Asterisk project Mark Spencer.

In Lyman's view the Trixbox Asterisk community is very
different from the Digium Asterisk community.

"Digium's efforts around Asterisk have always been at the protocol layer,
pretty far down into the stack," Lyman noted. "The Trixbox Asterisk
community has been much more at the application layer.

"In short, Digium is where the phone call meets the circuit-board, and
Trixbox is where the phone meets the business. Both of these stages are
critical."

Trixbox 2.0 is expected to be available as a beta from this
week and the final version targeted for availability in the next 30 days.